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Nathan Giede: What is wrong with the BC Assessment Authority?

Are humans or machines to blame for these assessments?
BC Assessment

An open letter to the BC Assessment Authority:

Greetings - from Earth. I mention this general return address because obviously no one in your organization lives on the same planet as the rest of us. The reports carried by the Citizen were not just clickbait: double digit increases are appearing everywhere in B.C.’s Northern Capital, even in cases where a sale in the same calendar year proves a drastically lower value.

I have appealed my case and helped many friends do the same. Whatever it takes, in my tribunal or another, my fundamental question will remain the same: are humans or machines to blame for these assessments? We, the people, have a right to know, because if it was a fellow man or woman, he or she might be redeemed; but if it was artificial intelligence, or an algorithm with bad programming, then none of us need to be polite or merciful in our response.

This isn’t Vancouver - it’s not even Langley or Peachland, which border high value areas. This is a resource sector town with a low population density, and it simply does not follow that our homes should be marked up to Lower mainland or sun-tax country values.

To be clear, you civil servants are not the only trespassers against us. Those who inflated the housing bubble are also guilty of making life unaffordable - may rising interest rates and cooling markets ruin them.

But the core issue at hand is that a civil authority carries a responsibility to the people it affects regarding the property it governs. And the nature of public entities is that they are to stand outside the market, unaffected by the whims of greed, especially those lost souls who see the farming of people or the hoarding of houses as their means to wealth. If the state, by an all-powerful authority, will allow itself to become another market actor, what hope is there?

No one with a conscience at your institution can really believe nor defend a Prince George special, split-level house built in 1960 being assessed at $499,000, particularly when its kitty corner clone just sold for $309,000. Or a 1975 townhouse bought in 2022 for $40,000 less than asking, being assessed for its original sale price. Or my own .75 acre plot in Shelley townsite, with a blocked well and services still not yet installed, being assessed for twice what we paid in September?

No, that last point is not an exaggeration.

Your own website states what was paid versus this latest assessment, just inches apart on the page. Again, I demand an honest answer: was it a human or a machine that generated these numbers? These numbers are so out of whack that giving the benefit of the doubt is too much to bear. Surely a hapless intern or a malfunctioning program is to blame. You can’t really stand by this, can you?

However, I already know the answer. I have dealt with your ilk before. Our farm’s rear quarter-section - without services, buildings, road access, or easement - was reassessed as “lakeside residential.” I appealed that redesignation and at the tribunal your representative compared a farmer’s field to fully-serviced five acre lots with McMansions on Eena Lake. I would have laughed and given that bureaucrat top points for comedy, but he was absolutely serious.

And that is the troubling thing about this entire affair.

Yes, the world is going to hell. But moments like these, when the privilege and power of an “authority” boils down to a presentation that would have earned a failing grade in any class, makes our descent into hell somehow more insane. The music on the Titanic was composed by geniuses and played by talented musicians. On our sinking ship, the soundtrack is apparently civil servants with their hands in their armpits.

These misassessments will not stand. Your sad choices, whether they be in staff or in actuarial programming, have been weighed, measured, and found woefully wanting. There will be justice at the tribunal. If not, I wouldn’t want to be you when “the meek shall inherit the earth.”

Nathan Giede is a Prince George writer.